A young writer finds once more that it isn't too early to look back on his life and laugh out loud.
Mulgrew (Everything Is Wrong with Me, 2010) returns to his formative years at an exclusive prep school for bright boys and finds a ton of absurdist comedy gold to mine.
As a teen, the author enjoyed growing up in a close-knit, lower-middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, where scrapes were common and everybody knew your business. But Mulgrew also pined for the rarified atmosphere of elevated learning offered by Saint Joseph's Preparatory School. The author has a good sense of comic timing, whether he’s relating his introduction to the wonderful world of self-gratification or describing his penchant for wearing a full-length fur cape around school grounds. Mulgrew's cynical run for class vice president serves as the penultimate moment of his often-raucous recollections, but there are plenty of other hilarious vignettes along the way. Luckless in love, the author also garners both compassion and condemnation for his feckless way with women. Characters from Mulgrew's previous memoir, like his two-fisted dad and no-nonsense mom, make return appearances that are both funny and profound. Relentlessly self-deprecating yet unabashedly accepting, the author displays a palpable sense of humanity. Things only slightly slow down and threaten to veer into potentially pretentious territory when Mulgrew runs down his all-time favorite songs. He quickly redeems himself, however, with an emotionally honest story involving his father and a rebuilt motorcycle that the ill-equipped son cannot possibly master.
A young writer finds once more that it isn't too early to look back on his life and laugh out loud.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-208083-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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